In The Theatre and Its Double, first published in 1938, Antonin Artaud puts forward his radical theories on drama and theatre, which he saw as being stifled by conservatism and a lack of experimentation.Containing the famous manifestos of the 'Theatre of Cruelty', this collection of essays analyses the underlying impulses of performance, provides suggestions on a physical-training method for actors, and features a long appreciation of the expressive values of Eastern dance...

First published in 1938, "The Theatre and Its Double" is a collection of essays detailing Antonin Artaud's radical theories on drama, which he saw as being stifled by conservatism and lack of experimentation. It contains the famous manifestos of the 'Theatre of Cruelty', analyses the underlying impulses of performance, provides some suggestions on a physical training method for actors and actresses, and features a long appreciation of the expressive values of Eastern dance drama. Also incl...

Antonin Artaud’s novelised biography of the 3rd-century Roman Emperor Heliogabalus is simultaneously his most accessible and his most extreme book. Written in 1933, at the time when Artaud was preparing to stage his legendary Theatre of Cruelty, HELIOGABALUS is a powerful concoction of sexual excess, self-deification and terminal violence. Reflecting its author’s preoccupations of the time with the occult, magic, Satan, and a range of esoteric religions, the book shows Artaud at his most l...

Published here in its entirety in English, Artaud's Revolutionary Messages collects Antonin Artaud's political, aesthetic and philosophical writings during his travels to Mexico in 1936.Written around the same time as his seminal work The Theatre and its Double, it captures a crucial point in Artaud's life shortly before he was admitted to a mental asylum in which he was to spend a significant part of his later life.Revolutionary Messages contains...

The ocean and its biodiversity have been attracting increasing interest from a humanities perspective over the last decades. The book Elusive Partners aims to provide a valuable insight into this research work on marine species, with a specific focus on the French-speaking world. Taking its inspiration from an interdisciplinary dialogue developed over several years at the National Museum of Natural History (Paris), this book highlights the need for comparative and long-term research on the...

The definitive statement on aesthetics and the history of modernism from one of France's most renowned philosophers. Composed of a series of scenes that defined modernism, Aisthesis takes its reader from Dresden in 1764 to New York in 1941. Along the way, we view the Belvedere Torso with Winckelmann, accompany Hegel to the museum and Mallarm� to the Folies-Berg�re, attend a lecture by Emerson, visit exhibitions in Paris and New York, factories in Berlin, and film sets in Moscow an...

Octavio Paz conveying his awareness of Duchamp as a great cautionary figure in our culture, warning us with jest and quiet scandals of the menacing encroachment of criticism, science and even art.” -New York Times Book Review

In this remarkable collection of 100 manifestos from the last 100 years, Alex Danchev presents the cacophony of voices of such diverse movements as Futurism, Dadaism, Surrealism, Feminism, Communism, Destructivism, Vorticism, Stridentism, Cannibalism and Stuckism, taking in along the way film, architecture, fashion, and cookery.Artists' manifestos are nothing if not revolutionary. They are outlandish, outrageous, and frequently offensive. They combine wit, wisdom, and world-shaking...

'I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage.'Peter Brook's seminal book, an acknowledged classic of theatre writing, sets out many of the ideas about theatre which informed his lifelong work as a theatre director, from his iconic 'white box' production of A Midsummer Night's Dream and his ground-breaking adaptation of The Mahabharata, to his work at the International Centre for Theatre Research.Available as an ebook for the first time sin...

Wassily Kandinsky was an influential Russian painter and art theorist, now celebrated as one of the pioneers of pure abstraction in modern painting. Delphi’s Masters of Art Series presents the world’s first digital e-Art books, allowing digital readers to explore the works of the world’s greatest artists in comprehensive detail. This volume presents Kandinsky’s collected works in beautiful detail, with concise introductions, hundreds of high quality images and the usual Delphi bonus m...

This pioneering book stands as the most comprehensive treatment of the lives, ideas and art works of the remarkable group of women who were an essential part of the Surrealist movement. Frida Kahlo, Meret Oppenheim and Dorothea Tanning, among many others, became an embodiment of their age as they struggled towards artistic maturity and their own 'liberation of the spirit' in the context of the Surrealist revolution. Their stories and their achievements are presented here against the backgr...

Emerging from the disruption of the First World War, surrealism confronted the resulting ‘crisis of consciousness’ in a way that was arguably more profound than any other cultural movement of the time.The past few decades have seen an expansion of interest in surrealist writers, whose contribution to the history of ideas in the twentieth-century is only now being recognised. Surrealism: Key Concepts is the first book in English to present an overview of surrealism through the cent...